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3 P’s of High Performance Marketing

Today’s high growth, rapid market share acquisition, and performance-driven marketing focus by companies leave a lot to be desired when programs and campaigns hit the market. Why? Because companies too often rely on the wrong things to get the results they need.

What are the critical components of a high performing marketing team? In this episode, we sit down with Douglas Karr and discuss what things companies need to consider in order to become high-performance.

Kyle and Doug discuss:

  • What are the 3 P’s of high-performance marketing?
  • How companies go wrong with just picking a platform
    When processes need improvement what do you do
  • Why people are to often overvalued or under appreciated for what’s required to be high-performance
  • Where to look for answers when you aren’t seeing the results you want.

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TRANSCRIPT

Intro: 

Welcome to The Summit. A podcast focused on bringing you the knowledge and insights for industry leaders. I’m your host Kyle Hamer, and I’m on a mission to help you exceed your potential. As a sales guy, turned marketer, I am passionate about building sustainable businesses. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 20 years, it’s like you won’t find it over-night growth scheme, a shortcut to success or a way to hack yourself. Nope . Success is the byproduct of hard work rate relationships and deep understanding done over and over. We’re here to help you unlock that success with some secrets from other people, one conversation At a time.

Kyle Hamer: 

Thanks for joining us today on The Summit. I’m your host, Kyle Hamer and we’re here with today’s special guest Douglas Karr Douglas. Welcome to the show.

Douglas Karr: 

It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me super excited. I think we’re going to have a fantastic conversation today.

Intro: 

For those of you who don’t know, Douglas Douglas is a digital transformation expert. Who’s been focused on digital marketing and technology for man. I think he said like 30 bazillion years or something crazy like that since the Abacus, since the advocate’s . All right. I love it. Depending on the week, you’ll find Doug speaking, harassing people, doing podcasts or developing and teaching workshops, writing publications, and working with people on technology in a common sense way. Over the last decade, Doug’s been known to start several different companies. He’s been a critical resource for marketing and technology startups, and I’m sure the list goes on besides all of those things and being an all around great guy, Douglas, what did I miss?

Douglas Karr: 

T two biggies that I’m super proud of. I was a Navy vet, so that’s one thing. And then and then the second one was, I was actually a single dad. So a lot of this was me broke and raising two kids at the same time too. So so that’s, that’s a , that’s a wacky combination.

Kyle Hamer: 

That’s pretty awesome. So Navy vet, what what division or what , what, what did you do in the in the Navy?

Douglas Karr: 

I was on I was on, what’s called an LST. It was a tank landing ship, so we carried troops and everything else. I was in desert storm, desert shield way, way, way, way back in the day. But back then and it, and it’s a weird transition, but back then I was a industrial electrician in the Navy. And so I was fixing generators and switchboards and power distribution systems and everything else. And ironically, I joked about being old, but that’s how old I am. I’m so old that when I got into when I, I left the Navy honorably discharged, and then I went to a newspaper doing the same work. And that was the advent of the internet. It was basically when fiber was going in and and companies were just starting to figure out how to use it. We didn’t even have, you know, at the time it wasn’t even browser-based or anything like that. And, and so we didn’t, we didn’t have it groups. And so it was actually electricians, electronics technicians at a lot of companies that started wiring these systems up and programming them and everything else. And I was just blessed enough to be with a good company that was on the, on the bleeding edge of that. So that’s how, that’s how I got my start.

Kyle Hamer: 

That’s pretty cool. My my brother was a corpsman in the, in the Navy and one of my close friends in college actually now is the, who’s the second command on a ship.

Douglas Karr: 

That would be the XO, the executive officer.

Kyle Hamer: 

So he is an XO for a battleship station in in Coronado . So in the , a bag in the area out there. So he started off in the nuclear reactor program in row . That was up through the ranks as well. See, look, the world is getting smaller, really, really fast. I never did know that much about the Navy and yet here we are.

Douglas Karr: 

Yeah, it’s a , it’s a , it’s a good, it’s a good branch. It’s a little bit different than the other ones. I think other ones are kind of military first and Navy is more job first military second. And so every, everybody, you know, you go to work every day , just like everybody else does, except that you’re on a, on a floating city where people are really dependent on you. So it was a , it was a great experience for me. I’m , I’m, I’m really proud to be a vet

Kyle Hamer: 

That’s . That’s awesome. And then, you know, raising two single kids, that’s no, that’s nothing to shake a stick at for anybody who’s listening and stuck at home with trying to do work and raise kids and teach while we’re going through COVID. This is, I mean, it’s being a single parent. Add that on top of it. That’s just it says you’re a specialist .

Douglas Karr: 

I couldn’t, I could, yeah, I could not imagine my kids are both grown and both graduated college and on their own today, nowadays I couldn’t, I couldn’t even imagine with COVID, you know what, it’s what it’s like for a single parent. Wow. Tough, tough times.

Kyle Hamer: 

Tough times. Well, you know, today today’s topic I’m really excited about because this is something that with your work in , at Dell and Roche Salesforce, good at Angie’s list. And even those pesky Indy Colts we’re going to talk about the, we’re gonna talk about the three P’s of high performance marketing teams and, and high performance technology. And for those who are listening in, what are those three PS and what makes them high performance?

Douglas Karr: 

It’s a, it’s a, it’s an interesting, the good question there is, you know, we’re always talking about marketing and nowadays with digital, everybody’s focused on, you know, what are you using? What kind of silver bullet are you using and everything else. And, and so the, the three P’s that I always go back to are it’s the same with any organization, people, processes, and platforms. And so I, we are constantly focused on, you know, who you have on your team, how motivated they are, how innovative they are, how open to change they are. And then we’re, you know, with processes, it’s, it’s a matter of what are you doing that can be automated? What are you doing that is wasting time? Where are you focusing your attention that makes, you know, the best results. And then with, with platforms, it’s a , that’s a critical one nowadays, it’s, you know, are you utilizing, you know, maybe a small platform that’s easy to implement and easy to turn around ROI on, but, but perhaps a little bit inflexible, you know, or are you going major high end , you know, where you have ultimate flexibility, but then, you know, there’s the additional cost of, you know, implementation and customization and everything else. And so it’s, it’s, it’s a topic that is near and dear to my heart because most people call us after they signed on the bottom line with a platform and they think that the platform is gonna solve all of their issues. And and while it might have all the functionality the, the gaps are just huge, you know, that they have to overcome internally.

Kyle Hamer: 

Well, it sounds to me like you think that there’s maybe a sequence in either at least addressing or selecting. And when you say, Hey, You called me after you got this platform, Will don’t you start with the platform and then figure the other parts out? Or is there a, is there a different way to approach this particular world of digital transformation so that you do get the high performance out of your team?

Douglas Karr: 

Yeah, I think, you know, if you’re, if you’re a pen and paper or somebody that uses Excel and that’s how you’re doing your process and and, and it’s getting uncomfortable, you know, you’ve added team members and everything else, and you don’t have a system in place. Some of these you know, great out of the box solutions are fantastic for doing that. Like you know HubSpot par dot act on active campaign. There’s, there’s a ton of different, you know, both sales related and then marketing related platforms. And the nice things about those is you’re getting up . You’re getting a process in a box too , because you have to do it their way and you have to use the system their way, and you have to, you know, grow your business you know, their way, the, the, the bigger problems come when you’re downstream a little bit. And that’s maybe that you have you know, a team of salespeople and , and marketing team, and they have their current processes that they use that work. Fantastic. And sometimes it’s, each person has a different process and platform and , and everything else. Well, then, then it’s really difficult because if you take an implement a new platform that may have all the bells and whistles of a great, you know, modern marketing automation and sales engagement, you know system, then you’re going to have to go back to your salespeople and your marketing people and say, we need the way we need you to change the way that you’re doing business. And that can be a daunting task. That’s where you can, you know, if you’ve got great sales reps, you can lose your sales reps. They’ll just say, you know what, you’re having me with systems all day instead of getting conversions and getting my commission. So I’m out of here and I’m going to go to another place. You could have marketing teams that, you know, if , if their entire time was spent developing and getting certified in one application that they, they might just say, I’m not doing this. There’s a ton of people out there that need my help. And I can get a better job, you know, somewhere else, working on the platform that I’m comfortable with. And so a company’s kind of miss these gaps. A lot of times, they, they focus on the bottom line, which, which is of course good. They focus on, you know, what, what kind of enhancements in innovation a platform might give them, but they often miss those internal components on, on, you know, how are they going to get there and do they have the right team of people to get there? And then and then are they going to be able to change their processes, you know, to, to fit, you know, whatever new system it is.

Kyle Hamer: 

It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s both terrifying and fun to hear you tell this and talk about this, because in the work that we do live, it just, just the same way you do where folks come in and they’ll buy half of something, they’ll say, Oh, I love that this does X, Y, and Z, but I only got this part of the package. Okay, great. How does that fit into your process? What process are you talking about? What do you mean by they look at you with an inquest? Well we just going to make it work right? Well Hm . But usually where the big, the big gaps I see happen. And I’m curious if you see this as well as the process is a by-product of having the right people. So people have to be thinking about stuff in, in a systemized way or in a systematic way. It can’t just be show up and do the old George judge and push a button. How do you, how do you help organizations identify that, Hey, maybe this is a process issue, or maybe this is a people issue, or boy, you really did. You did really mess it up here. You bought, you bought your platform in a box, you got your process, but it is going to , it’s going to implode. How do you help organizations sort through that?

Douglas Karr: 

Yeah. Th there’s an internal component to that and an external component. I think, you know, folks like us that do this on a daily basis and have touched so many organizations and, you know, you, you listed off some of the big ones, but I’ve worked with mom and pop roofing companies and dental, you know, dental clinics and everything else as well is, you know, the, the biggest thing is on the front end of it really kind of auditing, you know, what that looks like. And so we, we look at it two ways. One is internally. So if you could take each employee and ask them, you know, what do you do on a daily basis? How much time do you spend doing it? Oh, show me that process. Show me, show me how you’re working in these systems and what you’re doing. That typically is enlightening. And, and the funny thing is it’s not just enlightening to the consultant. It’s also to the leadership at the company as well. Most times leaders at the top end of the ladder don’t really understand the nuances or the difficulty of sometimes simple activities down at the, at the bottom end. And so that internal process and automation or audit is really, really critical. And so we’ve been blessed enough to have a couple of companies take us in for vendor selection. That’s where, that’s where they , they call us before they go look for a solution. And , and part of that process is this two sides. One is internally, we take a look at everything that they’re doing and each person on the team, what processes they take, what systems that they’re going in and out of how long it takes. And that’s where we can kind of see where the inefficiencies are based on our experience externally. And then the other side of it is the customer experience, because those are the kind of two sides of the digital transformation is. Okay. How difficult is it now for your customer you know, for your customer to add an open, a support ticket, or call you, or get a sales demonstration or or anything like that, and you would be amazed at how people, you know, I mean, we have literally gone before to , you know people that have launched brand new websites and brands and everything else. I go in, I sign up for their demonstration and I don’t get any response back. And then I contact the marketing team, you know, and I say, Hey, by the way, I, I tested this out and I didn’t get a response back. And then they find out that it’s routed to an employee that no longer exists or something like that. And so it’s really funny when you bring in a third party and kind of that clear you know, objective, you know , view of your internal processes and external experience. Almost always, you know, we, we uncover these inefficiencies and gaps and stuff, and the good thing is, as we audit those, as we kind of say, here’s, here’s every step, then you see where the exceptions are. You know, there’s always exceptions, you’ve got your, you know, maybe it’s a key client that you do some really cool stuff for, and it’s not listed anywhere on your site or, you know, or, or in any of your products or it’s a custom product that they do, you know, but then you start to , to see where revenue is and where the problems are, where the time is spent. And , and that way, you know, when you look at a solution, you can basically say, okay, well, we could do a short-term solution and that would fix X, Y, and Z. And you could get a good ROI, you know, or we could do a long-term customization, which is, you know, major investment upfront, but downstream, you know, you’re, you’re going to get a far, far greater payout, and there’s all the kind of, you know , pieces in between. Most of the time we push clients to speed over, over over the other stuff, because if, if, if you can get them, you know, if you can get employees motivated, make their job easier, give them more time to be creative and to help customers and find solutions. And then you can change the experience on the customer side to make things a little bit easier. A lot of the times that that, you know, steam rolls into revenue and profitability, that then you can take and reinvest into a much bigger investment into a new solution or a new platform down the road. And so we’re always kind of focused on, on, on all of those key metrics. You know, when looking at a solution and we’re , while we’re a Salesforce partner, we’re, we’re, we really are vendor agnostic. We have clients right now that are on Marquetto that we’re helping, and we have clients on other platforms. And so the good thing is, is because we, we, we kind of test and use all of these different systems. We’re able to bring some expertise to the table where they might say, you know what we want to migrate from this to that. And we can say, okay, well, looking at your processes, here’s where that’s going to break down, but here’s where you’re going to get efficiencies and, and , and kind of be more realistic with them. But, but, you know, you said it, and, and we’re , we’re talking about is a lot of companies don’t do that. You know, a lot of companies look at analyst reports they trust their peers. And so they say, well, we’re going to buy this solution because everybody else has that solution. And it works great. And then all of a sudden the trouble starts because they didn’t have the budget, they didn’t have the timeline, they didn’t have the resources internal, they don’t have the right, you know , training. They don’t have any kind of deployment capabilities. They might not have any money left over from the license to do, you know, custom integration, you know, all of these, all of these problems. And that’s why I think, I think the big number in the industry is something like 60% of enterprise digital transformation projects fail. And I think that’s why is , is people just don’t do that upfront. You know, they go through the whole sales process where they’re talking to the different vendors and they’re getting budget and features and use cases of course have use cases that are the most, you know , grandiose, you know, fantastic results that companies got using that platform. But they didn’t look internally to see whether there was a match, you know, with, with that solution.

Kyle Hamer: 

Well, so it’s interesting. It’s interesting to hear you , you talk about the experience because I think it is, it is very interesting to see how vendors present. Oh, somebody has been on my platform for 10 years and look at how it works for their organization, but they don’t encapsulate the first six, 12, 18 months of pain and struggle where they were just trying to get my thing to work before they put this case study. Right. I think they think probably 50% of the people that bought Salesforce or, or some of these others, if they had to do a case study after 12 months, nobody would have bought it ever again, just because it’s, it’s so powerful. And so customizable that out of the box, sometimes you just beating your head against the wall going, ah, this is more effort than I had signed up for.

Douglas Karr: 

Yeah. There, there’s a portion of our industry that it’s almost funny that you can ask, I , I would be willing to bet if you asked 10 CMOs at large companies, what they thought of, let’s say a Salesforce marketing cloud, I’d say probably half of them said I will never, ever, ever use that system again. And it’s because of exactly what you just said is, you know, they, they try, you know, they tried to, you know, kind of chisel and, and wedge this solution in based maybe on, you know, the sales reps expectations that were missed, you know, sat based on a partner that might’ve been a terrible implementation partner that didn’t know how to photo li utilize the system. And maybe it even got them fired. Right. Maybe they went through this implementation and it was a disaster. And so they swear off the platform forever. And and unfortunately they, you know, they’re swearing off a platform that is, you know, it’s, it’s like a race car. You can tweak every knob and every bolt in everything to make it work right. But you know, that it takes a race car mechanic, you know, to be able to do that. And it takes someone with a vision of where they’re going to run the race and who their competitors are and everything else, you know, to get that done. And so some companies just aren’t ready for that, you know , so we will tell companies when that, when that is, if they, if they’re sitting there expecting, you know, to do an enterprise migration in three months and and, you know, get their ROI on it we’re going to look at them like, they’re crazy. And, but if they’re looking at a smaller system, you know, maybe like a HubSpot or Pardot or Salesforce IQ act on, I mean, there’s dozens of them infusion soft . These are, these are really great, you know, small systems where you’re, you know, you kind of have finite, you know, expectations, but implementation, training, everything else might go Mo might go quicker. So you can’t customize it and automate it as much as, you know , you could to reach your fullest potential, but you could definitely, you know, hit an ROI a lot earlier. And so you have these, you know, our industry is full of them. You have people that just say, well, that’s a bad, that’s a terrible platform. I used it once at a company and it was awful. And what you wind up seeing is will they use it at a company? And that company maybe didn’t really know what they were buying, didn’t implement it correctly and maybe hired the wrong contractors or partners to implement it. You know, that didn’t care. All they cared about was burning hours and development time and everything else. And and so they, they, you know, they just didn’t reach the full potential. My , my that’s why we’re pretty vendor agnostic. We w you know, you can, you can take almost any enterprise level system and customize it almost any way that you want. And then even now the smaller systems have such a great ecosystem of plugins and modules and add-ons and API APIs that, that you can really succeed, you know , on using them too . And so I’m not, you know, I , I almost never listened to anybody that says, well, that system sucks or that system’s fantastic. I always want to ask deeper questions there.

Kyle Hamer: 

Right . Well, and , and , and what I’ve, what I’ve found is, is that usually if somebody says it sucks, it’s because they asked the wrong question to begin with, right. It’s I started with the wrong problem statement. And so I got the wrong solution . It’s like you know, if I, if I had a family of 10 and I went out and I was only shopping for smart cars, like I’m going to have a problem getting my family of 10 from point a to point B. But if I go and I’m shopping for, you know, conversion vans or, or utility vans, like I made the be like, you’ve got a contracting company, no , I just have a really large family. So I think sometimes it just starts your requirements. If you ask the wrong question, you put the wrong problem statement in, you get the wrong outcome. I’m curious.

Douglas Karr: 

Yeah. And where , well , I was just going to add we’re , we’re bad at that too. Like, the industry is terrible at that. If you have a sales rep that sales rep is going to show you the glowing high gloss perfect results of the most fabulous case study, right. And, and , and they’re going to get you salivating over what you can accomplish with that, with their platform, Hey, that’s their job, right? That’s, that’s absolutely their job. But I would say that the better company is tone that down. You know, the better companies talk to their sales reps and say, look, we’re going to irritate. These people they’re going to leave is difficult and hurts us. And it hurts revenue. It hurts. It’s expensive, you know, let’s, let’s set valid expectations for your clients and, and set expectations that we can actually achieve. And I think, I think there’s some really good companies that do that. I , I almost feel like it depends on the sales rep, you know, sometimes sales reps you know, are , are a little bit higher, a little bit over the top on, on what can be accomplished. Well ,

Kyle Hamer: 

I think some of that has to do with the, how seasoned they are, right? So if I’m as my first sale or I’m in my first year or two years in a particular position, I’m probably not as good at active listening or uncovering those really deep rooted challenges that the organization is going to have to overcome in order for it to be successful and get all of the things you’re salivating about. I just want to sell something. But after two or three years of watching people leave, or your quota doesn’t stick or whatever it may be, you’re starting to go, okay, well, maybe I’ve got to develop. And so it’s I was talking with another gentlemen actually Josh Wagner from lead MD. And he was telling me, he’s like, you’re like, I’ll get in these conversations. Like, well, my sales rep and he’s like, your sales rep didn’t ask the right questions. It’s not, he was probably he or she was probably just young and it’s not a disservice, they’re following a playbook. The playbook was built to be a predictive model and to scale up and to get as many people acquired in the market, share as possible. And that’s the way they’ve built it. You know, that’s , that’s kind of the game right now. Now, should we improve? I think we should. I think we should exponentially, but it’s kind of,

Douglas Karr: 

But you know, you’re not going to , you’re going to , if you, if you’re going to put a package together and productize it and put it on a shelf at the supermarket, you’re not going to put the, it works half the time, you know, that’s true. That’s very true. That’s true. It’s, you know, it’s buyer beware too . That’s why we, we do advise people that, Hey, go talk to someone like Kyle, go talk to someone like Doug. Bring someone in if you’re going to make a major investment like that, that is going to be, you know, literally millions of dollars, even to a smaller organization. You know, if you’re investing, let’s say, you know, $20,000 into a marketing automation solution, the , the downstream impact on revenue and internal expenses is probably a million dollars. And so why wouldn’t you go hire someone like, you know , yourself or me for, you know, maybe 90 days to help you through that process. And then to, to, you know, we can go find other industry, people that are utilizing it, people that we know we can go find other experts on, on the platform that can tell you what your limitations are. Sometimes it’s talking to your current vendors that you need to integrate with and see what possibilities are there. And, and so we, you know, I , I just think that there’s consultants always kind of have a bad name a lot of times, but these are the types of things that if you got us in before you purchased, we can help you with that decision making process. And, and the nice thing is, is you still might make the same decision, but the good thing is, is the roadblocks and the, and , and everything else we’re expected. And, and you’re , and so the expectations are, are going to be there on what what’s difficult, what’s easy, what you gained, what you lost. And so I just wish more companies would think about that instead of just saying, well, our budget is, you know, whatever our budget is, you know, $2,000 a month or $5,000 a month, or, you know, $10,000 a month what can we buy for that? I wish instead they would say, look that a hundred thousand dollar investment we make is going to last, you know, for it’s gonna, it’s, it’s gonna impact every, every aspect of our organization’s operations and customer service and customer experience. Maybe we should spend, you know, $20,000 upfront and really bring a consultant in that knows this industry that knows the platforms in the industry that has worked with other people so that they can, they can help us, you know, help guide us on our decision making process. And I just wish more companies would , would do that because the person internal may think that they know but they just don’t have exposure to a lot of companies like we do

Kyle Hamer: 

Well. And I think the other thing that’s really interesting that, that oftentimes doesn’t get considered and , and I’m really interested for your perspective is the personnel. So, and I’ll use one of my historical a hundred years ago, I sold learning management systems. We competed against this APS , the PeopleSofts , the giant Oracle software systems that were out there. And one of the things that a lot of organizations, and I’m now seeing it prevalent in, in MarTech , but what a lot of things that the organization would do is they would get somebody who was really, really great at people management and really, really great at process and , and bringing in people and making them feel a part of the team and doing the, you know, the legal part of their job and the onboarding and the off-boarding . And then they would say, okay, well, now we’re going to automate that. And we’re going to put this into a computer. We’re going to digitize this process. And when they digitized it, they forgot that the person didn’t have the skills. They didn’t have the skills to work in the technology or the technology frustrated them, or they didn’t have the aptitude. Is there, is there some of this call it a projection? Is there a projection that the vendors are doing on what can be done with their system? That’s completely limited by the people you have on your team?

Douglas Karr: 

Oh, without a shadow of a doubt, you know, like I, like I said earlier, we, we, we we’ve been doing the implementation for our company right now where you know, I would say two , two people, internal one person internal was a certified person on the platform that they were on before. And you know, of course they were all on board during the you know, the sales phase and everything else. Well, the entire time they were looking for a job you know, because they, they didn’t want to leave their industry. They, they had basically built their entire reputation and knowledge base and everything else around this platform that was now getting migrated off of, at this company. And while they love their work every day they’re leaving. So that’s, that’s one example. We we’ve seen other examples where if people aren’t included in the decision-making process. And so we, we have another person that they weren’t in the meetings, the sales meetings, they weren’t invited to them and or anything else. Well, there , they’ve got a really bad taste in their mouth about the entire, you know, investment in implementation. And while it might make their lives easier, you know, they’re , they’re , they were never bought in. And so it , you know, it’s our job as consultants and in helping them is, you know, is , is, you know, really trying to push, pull or drag and cheer them up and let them know that this is going to be easier and here’s the steps and everything else. And so that, that person adds a lot of complexity, you know, to that. Leadership is incredible. I think, I think good leaders at a company identify, you know, where the roadblocks are and, and, and move around them. So you might have a team that’s awesome execution on a certain they’re process oriented , but maybe they’re not they’re change averse. They don’t like they don’t like change to happen. Well, we’ve watched leaders just go, okay, well, what I’m going to do is I’m going to augment that. And I’m going to bring in this other team where these, these people are very innovative and entrepreneurial, and they’re going to take care of the change management, build the processes, get it all working, and then hand it back to these people that are really risk averse and change averse, and want to do the same job every single day. And so I think peop people are are , are an absolute linchpin. The other side of that, too, that I’ll say is that, especially when it comes to marketing and sales, you know, this is, is, you know, this is the first budgets cut. It’s the tightest budgets. Your sales reps are, you know, the demand on them is greater and greater every year with marketing, we see this, it’s almost horrendous. You know, we have however many channels now in mediums that we’re supposed to be communicating out of yet . You know, the staff has gotten cut over the last, you know, decade to , to half of what it was. And people say, well, you know, well , digital is easier, so you should be able to do more. And, and, but the problem is, is that we keep adding more you know, on what people should be doing. And so one of the problems that we see from a people perspective internally too, is these people can’t even keep up with their current jobs. Now you’re asking them to transition, implement a new system, have the overlap, you know, so maybe, maybe fourth quarter, like right now, is there high seasonal time and high demand time. So you’re, you’re asking them to, you know, take their highest demand time and then help an implementation for a new system and then learn a new system during the roughest time of the year, you know? And so you’re just stressing everybody out and you’re just, you know, making it, you know, just a horrible, horrible experience, you know, internally. And so people are definitely just the linchpin of all of this and the organizations that we see really good have have a culture of change. They, they, you know, they they invite failure. And, and I don’t mean like, you know, tragic failure. I just mean that they invite people to take risks, to try new things. They adopt that changes the constant always. They tend to hire people that are that way. They, people that might get bored doing the same job every single day. And so those are the companies that we really see that, that are a lot more successful at digital transformation. The companies that we see, I, we worked with one major it wasn’t a national, it was probably, they were probably in about 30 States once. We worked with them for a little while and it was a retailer and we went in there and they said, well, we’ve, we’ve spent, you know, $2 million on developing our backend system. And and there’s no way that we’re going to change that. And we had to look them in the eye and say, well, there’s, there’s no way that we can help you then, because your backend system is so terrible that it, you know, you couldn’t integrate it with these new systems and new customer experience systems and marketing automation systems and logistics systems for e-commerce and delivery and everything else. And, and and they looked at us like, we’re crazy, but here we are 10 years later. And their headquarters is right across town and it’s, it’s empty because they, they went out of business. And so people, people can absolutely be you know, the most critical factor in every one of these implementations.

Kyle Hamer: 

I think it’s interesting. One of the things you hit on, you talked about, you know , people and their, their talent, their capacity, their appetite for change. Is there really such thing as a full stack marketer? Like, should I, should I have the expectation that I’m going to deploy this marketing system? And I can have somebody do everything from campaign design to content creation, to execution down, to pushing the button and making sure the leads show up for sales, like is, is there such a thing as a full stack marketer, is this kind of a unicorn and a myth?

Douglas Karr: 

I think it’s somewhat of a unicorn. I don’t know that I’m not gonna say that you can find someone that could be adequate across all of those areas. But it’s highly improbable that you’re going to get someone that has, you know, I’ll just say it like, like design, right. There is a design, you know, a true design genius, someone that understands user experience and user interface and how people interact with a screen or an application or whatever. And then at the same time have someone that understands the psychology of words and, you know, and titles and, and , and body of text and compelling content and then, and then take them and have them build a responsive email template that, you know, works across 25 email clients. I , I I’d be, you know, if , if that person is out there they’re, they’re probably they’re probably running their own million dollar company. I’m guessing most of us in this industry say, you know, like me, I’m great at a high level. And then I know how to develop, and I know how to design, and I know enough about each of those kinds of silos that I can take an organization like mine our own. And I’m the CMO, and I’m the chief cook and bottle washer. I kind of do everything from a marketing perspective. But when it comes to our clients, I know that my time is better spent just, you know, getting like email design. I get a , get a responsive design coder. In two days, I can have a fully tested, you know, beautiful email design. That’s going to work across every email client. Well, that would take me, I know how to do it, you know, but my time is not better spent there. And so I think, I think the, the hard craft for an organization is, you know, you’ve got a toolbox , people are a toolbox and it’s, you know, you don’t use a hammer as a wrench and a wrench as a hammer. You know, you have to figure out what people are really talented at and good at, and then put them into those, you know, those right places where they can feel, you know, like they’re successful. So short answer is I , I don’t think that that person exists nor would I , I ever want it to, I would much rather have someone that’s curious that understands the concepts and then maybe goes out and finds the resources, you know, and they’re able to evaluate, you know, what like, like like I said, you know, responsive design for email, they’re able to say, wow, now I know how to do that. But boy, that’s going to take all day. And my time is better off spent maybe writing compelling content, because that’s what I’m really good at, or AB testing or analytics, you know, building dashboards or, you know, or campaign design or something like that. And let this expert that is fast, that is efficient, that can get stuff done in a fraction of the time and probably a higher quality offshore that, you know, to them and offload it to them and let them get it done because that’s, that’s just not the best use of my time.

Kyle Hamer: 

So, so with that as your , I mean, as you’re talking about you , by the way you, you talked about, you don’t use a hammer to do the job of a wrench, and obviously you didn’t grow up on my farm because my dad would hand me a hammer and say, make it work. So I don’t know if that holds water in my house, but I understand where you’re headed with that. Anyway . Yeah . But then again, you’re running a podcast right now, Kyle, you’re not fixing a tractor here, here. I used to drive back and forth for hours and wonder why the talk radio guys got their job. And I was like, forget it. I’ll just start my own thing. Yeah . But you know, to the, to the end of the , you know, there’s no unicorn, it’s, it’s different, different specialties, different jobs, different degrees of speed for a high-performance marketing team or for a high performance organization that’s deploying MarTech . How do you identify or, or select what you need on your team in order to be successful? Because at least in my experience, oftentimes if I’ve got the process, right, and maybe I have the head count , right. And even my system is working all the way together, there’s still an unrealistic expectation to your point earlier about, you know, your production is supposed to go up 40% as an individual, because now we’ve automated these things, but that you, you are already 70% over capacity to begin with. So yeah. How do you, how do you identify what you actually need when deploying, in order to be high performance ? Like what, you know , you’re a consultant, you talk to these groups, how do they, how does CMOs and VPs of marketing figure this out?

Douglas Karr: 

Yeah, I , I think one is, like I said is cultural. So I think you know, some of the companies that we work with do they make an investment in like behavioral testing, you know, for employees to identify what their you know, their ability to work better with other people in a team environment, their ability to work in a stressful environment, their ability to collaborate and communicate more effectively with each other. Cause , you know, especially like with a sales team, boy, when you get a sales team that’s ticking you have the sales leader there that is just motivating everybody. And then you have the team that is motivated and they just, they just skyrocket. I’ve seen it, you know , hundreds of times, regardless of process or platform I’ve seen, seen them just, you know, do a fantastic job. So I think cultural fit is is a huge component of it. You know, the next step down is probably the, the talent. And like I said, there’s a lot of people that are just curious. I love curious people. I love developers that want to learn how to use illustrator. And I love designers that want to learn how to program and they just, they just want to know enough to be dangerous so that they understand what the overlap is and where they need to depend on, on different people. And when you get that kind of right combination in place where you have a motivated team that really works together, and then they kind of understand how all the pieces work and the technology and everything works. They’ll tell you where the gap is. They’ll tell you that guys, we are spending, you know, maybe it’s RFP development, right. You know, maybe they’re sitting there going guys, this is grueling. We’re putting out 10 RFPs a week and we’re not getting our sales done and everything else. We really need a writer. We really need someone that a RFP so that we can, we can automate that process and hand it over to someone that’s really good at it. And I think when you get that type of person, when you get that type of team in there, it’s good, the dangerous people are the ones and are the, I can do everything. You know, we don’t have to outsource that. I could do that. Oh, I could do that. I could build that page. I could develop that integration. Those are the people that they, they, they have a list, you know, of a million things that they, they, they said that they could do internally and they never get it done. Because, because they you know, they just, they just, they just want to control kind of every aspect of it. And they don’t, they’re not able to make that decision of, well, I could do that, but that’s not the best use of my time. So let me offload that to somebody else. And so did that, did that answer it ? I think that that answered it.

Kyle Hamer: 

Yeah, it does. Well, and the thing that’s interesting is , is I had a mentor for many years. He used to say, he’d look at me and he’d say, Kyle, you put that on your plate. Are you going to eat it before you add something else? Or you’re going to keep stacking stuff up at the buffet because eventually you’re not even going to be able to carry the plate anymore and you go, Oh yeah, there’s something there’s something to be said for. Can I versus should I, so, I mean, I think you’re, you’re kind of spot on with that. And I think there’s also something in organizations with , with MarTech learning the art of saying no, right. You get an, a height , you get an , a highly motivated sales team. That sales guy is charismatic. The team they’re , they’re voracious,

Douglas Karr: 

They’re hungry, they’re motivated. Sales are going through the roof. They come over to the market .

Kyle Hamer: 

Can I, can I, can I, can I, would you, would you, would you, would you, and they’re most charming and , and , and benevolent way, all of a sudden you’re finding out that it’s like, ah , I’ve agreed to do a lot more than I should have or that we can do. And so now I’m all, all I’m ever in is in firefight mode. And if you’re always in firefight mode, it’s actually, in my opinion, it’s the antithesis to marketing automation. So anytime you deploy a technology, if you’re in firefight mode, you’re never going to get the most out of your technology because you don’t have a chance to go back and look and optimize and, and, and analyze what’s working, look at the things and actually get reporting to make insights for how you’re changing things or improving things. Or, you know, there’s just, you’re so busy doing, you’re not spending any time thinking. Yeah.

Douglas Karr: 

Yeah. And I think that’s a , and that’s a critical point, Kyle. And I think that’s where a lot of us are right now, especially in marketing. I think the, you know, the , the change is coming so quickly. You know, everything from, you know, social media has changed everything, the way that we handle our reputation and respond to customers, you got SEO, which is the algorithms are constantly, you know , adjusting and changing. And, and and do we have time, you know, to , to keep on top of all of this stuff, we just don’t, you know? And so, so that’s where you really do have to, you know , get better at relying on other people. I love also your, your plate, you know , analogy because that’s me, I love to say yes, I absolutely love to say yes. And so, as I get older and older, what I’ve realized is that, you know, when I, when I get to, yes, quick, it’s almost always gonna hurt me later and it’s going to hurt the relationship later, too. If I set expectations that I, I can’t keep and everything. So it’s a , it’s a really valid point.

Kyle Hamer: 

So let’s transition to the second P then. So we’ve talked about platform and how you can’t start there, or you , you can, but you might have to pay the Piper later. Lynn , Kunkle , Sam’s going to come collect the tax bill at , it might be higher than you expected. We talked about people and what we need to do, we need to look at, talk to me a bit about process. So how, how does, how does the process really facilitate becoming high performance ? What, what is it about it that makes it sing?

Douglas Karr: 

Most of what we do every day is really inefficient. It’s surprising when you look at someone’s daily job, you know, if you literally sat down and said, you know, as part of my revenue generation, these are, what do people pay me to do? And, and, and if you sat with someone and said, you know, every five minutes, I wanna , I want you to write down on a pad of paper, what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And then at the end of the day, you look at that pad of paper and see which ones actually aligned to revenue. Most of the time, you’ll find that the majority of work that we’re doing doesn’t impact revenue and , and both from a cost savings or, you know, a revenue generation standpoint. And so we, we tend to we’re humans, we tend to get sidetracked. We tend to do work that we like to do. I’m a curious person. So I tend to do things that I get curiosity, you know, in, if you’re a person that likes to own every process and kind of manage it yourself and micromanage, now you’re not offloading stuff. And so you’re, you’re getting more and more efficient at your day by not finishing things, not completing them, which has downstream issues and everything else. You know, it’s a, it’s a really fascinating thing where process is one of those things that I love. Look, if you , again, I’m going to go back to a sale, a high performing sales team, you know, those people one, they pick up the phone and they tell the person on the other end of the phone. If you’re not interested, feel free to tell me you’re not interested. They give them permission to say no right away, they don’t look at every phone call as an opportunity to say, yes, they look at you know, every phone call as an opportunity to get to know faster so that they can make the next phone call to obviously get somebody on, you know, that that’s better. And when look at a sales team that is really, really highly effective, they have their process down you know, the, the, the sales rep, you know, she’s waking up in the morning and doing, you know , meditation, and I’m not lying, literally meditation, you know, to get into the right frame of mind, optimistic everything else. Then she’s going to do research on that client, and she’s gonna , you know, look at, you know, three things. She’s going to review notes from previous. She’s going to look them up on the internet. She’s going to look at, you know, who their competitors are and what their competitors are doing. She’s going to prep for the call. She’s going to go through her slide deck, you know, and then she does the call, you know, and in the call, she focuses on listening, listening, listening, you know, writing things down, you know picking up on cues of pain points and , and issues and everything else. And then she gets off that call and she repeats and repeats and repeats. And she’s got her process down to this finite finite, you know , kind of level so that she can maximize her compensation at work, get her bonuses, you know, and, and really do a great job. And so that’s a perfect, you know example of where I see, you know, people that are really just amazing optimizing processes, a high performance sales team is just unbelievable what they’re able to achieve. You , you compare a high performance sales team at one company to another company. That’s , that’s doing poorly, that’s not onboarding new clients that struggling with growth almost all the time. I’ll , I’ll, I’ll say, you know, it’s, it’s process internal and they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing. And then in , in marketing, again, in marketing our time, it’s amazing how much time that marketers spend moving data from one system to another. It could be querying and filtering and segmenting reports to try to find answers. It could be taking, you know, people out of their CRM and segmenting them for their marketing system. It could be, and these are all things that there are systems that make better decisions than we do on. And so you can build integrations and you can build optimizations and automated segmenting systems and AI driven, you know, segmentation systems now scoring lead, scoring systems, everything else, you know, that, that basically says, I mean, there’s even, there’s even systems. Now that will literally tell you, you know which words are, you know, if, if it looks through your site and sees how much traffic is on your site, it’ll tell you the words that are stand out the most, you know, on pages and what’s driving the most conversions and everything else. Well, we can’t look at a site and determine that just, you know, w we don’t have the capacity internally to do that. And so that’s where process breaks down is I watch marketers just spend all day on data analysis and data transformation when we hired them to be creatives that are listening to the sales team and listening to the customers, and then producing the right marketing materials that, you know, that help, you know, people kind of get along on the customer journey and , and buying journey. And and it’s unbelievable in marketing. It’s horrible right now

Speaker 4: 

Data, data, data, data, how many times

Douglas Karr: 

People have a spreadsheet open and they have a database querying engine open, and they, they’re doing an export from this system into that system. And, and they’re all they’re doing is moving data. Well, data can move seamlessly with integrations and automation. You know, you can buy third-party tools that do it. You can develop platforms that do it. You can, you know, there’s integrations that do it. I am, I am just utterly astounded at the time that marketers spend not doing their job and instead, you know, moving data or querying data on a daily basis. So those are two examples that I would say that are really just incredible opportunities. I, as, as a , as a marketer, I want to spend my time thinking about creative solutions. I want to spend my time looking at new products and new new, you know, behaviors and studies. And, and I want to AB test and optimize my site and everything else. The last thing I want to be doing is moving data from one place to another and bringing it into a spreadsheet and transforming it and fixing it and cleaning it and , and everything else it’s, it’s absolutely horrid nowadays. And so process process just provides us that opportunity to look where there’s places where we can get automation or efficiency. One of the I’ll give a perfect example. We have a company that they have an entire system middleware system that records come in and all they do is manually clean these records and then send them out to their other systems. And so we started to ask them why, you know, why , why, why are you doing all this? And they said, well, you know, the, the form submissions that we get are just terrible and 60% of the data is missing and everything else. And so we said, well, why not use a customer experience solution that, that, you know, basically is a wizard approach that, you know, takes one of your prospects or one of your customers. And they just click through a journey and captures all that information. And now you can get a hundred percent, you can make , make sure that every single record is 100% complete, and we can audit all of your entry points into your systems, implement the solution across all of them. And now that problem is gone and, you know, that’s a million dollar plus savings to that organization. And all, it was someone that knew that those, those systems even existed or that possibility was there. And so yeah, process processes, just this, that’s the freeing, you know, we should, we , like I said, we should have, you should walk into your marketer’s office. And I would love to walk into every marketer’s office and say, you know, what are you working on? And they go, I don’t know, I’m kind of looking at this new thing and it’s pretty cool. And maybe there’s a way that we can use it rather than walking in there and seeing them, trying to figure out how to write a SQL query, to pull down data from one place to another. I would, I would want my marketers to constantly be thinking about creative solutions, you know, that capture people’s attention instead.

Kyle Hamer: 

Interesting that you bring that up because to me, I think what we’ve, what we’ve seen specifically in the last five years is marketing’s gone from English class to math class at a, at a rate in which people can’t move from right to left brain. Yeah,

Douglas Karr: 

Absolutely. I , I , one example of that I think is, is analytics. And I, I’m hoping that the latest iteration of Google analytics is really getting us there, you know, but analytics is one of those perfect one where I was working with one client that they were US-based only. And and so they had a agency that basically had an out of the box solution that transformed their Google analytics reports into a nice report. And so, you know, the company was making decisions based on analytics and how they were going to change their website and, and everything else. And lo and behold, I looked and they were US-based, they were only serving people in the U S but this company had never filtered out, you know traffic from other countries. And so they had a ton of spam traffic and other traffic from you know, third world countries and everything else that was significantly, you know, skewing, you know, their analytics reports. And so they’re making business decisions based off of reports that are absolutely inaccurate. And so to your point with, you know, becoming math, whizzes analytics is this big nightmare sometimes where I asked people, you know, you know, what kind of reports do you have and have you done campaign tracking and event tracking and AB optimization, and maybe implemented like Google tag manager, you know, to help, you know, filter and segment and everything else. And they look at you well know we put the script tag on our site though. And so, so analytics winds up just being this big blob of all it is, is basically charts and data. It’s not giving you any answers none. And so now with the new iterations of Google analytics, if you haven’t checked those out, you know, they have kind of these I forget what they call it, but it’s basically these tips and tricks that they’re passing to you. And they’re actually using AI to study, you know, behavior of people through your website, and then telling you, Hey, is, you know, you’ve gained a lot of traction on this article or your people, people coming from social media are converting higher than people coming from here. And so they’re , they’re actually giving you answers now, instead of just giving you a blanket slate, you know, to , to build reports off of, and that’s exciting stuff. I love AI and machine learning just because I think, I think as marketers, we’re largely biased. We, we, we have comfort areas of my comfort is search engine optimization. I’m always going to talk a company into search engine optimization. If my, if my bias is pay-per-click, I’m going to talk them into pay-per-click if my biases . And so I love AI because AI doesn’t have the, you know, the marketer is bias, and it’s just going to tell the truth. And it’s going to say, this is working, this isn’t working. And, and now the marketer’s job is, you know, to fix that

Kyle Hamer: 

Well. And I think the other thing that’s really interesting is, is as marketers and you talk, I mean, we could spend hours talking about data and analytics and KPIs, but marketers we’ve spent years stuck in vanity metrics. We’ve been talking about things that make it look good, but maybe aren’t necessarily tied to powerful outcomes or business related decisions. Sorry, your email open rate is only at 12%. Did you actually segment that list down? Well, yeah, I did, but I only sent out 1200 emails. Great. But now look at your open rate. Your open rate is at 70%. So what’s more important, the volume of email or your open rate and your connect rate with your, your audience. Like there’s, there’s so many ways in which as I think as marketers, we’ve become irresponsible as we’ve gotten more data than w we know, Oh, well, it looks pretty make it look pretty, make it, like, make it visual. Let’s, let’s have those charts dance, and let’s have the lines go up there versus saying, okay, this isn’t vanity. What are the business decisions and outcomes we need to get to? And how does that affect the sales team? How does that affect our process? How does that affect our platform for , for being able to be successful?

Douglas Karr: 

Aye . Aye . Aye . I couldn’t agree with you more. I I did a video it’s out there on YouTube somewhere, but it, it talks about engagement. I hate the word engagement and I’ll tell , I’ll tell you why is the joke, the joke in the video is, is basically that, you know, I have this user ginger one, two, three, four, five, and I say, wow, you know, we’re engaged. And, and my buddy goes, what do you mean you’re engaged? And he , and , and I said, well, she, she likes my tweet. And , and so, you know, it’s, it’s, that’s not engagement. Engagement is put her , put a ring on it, you know? And so now if you can tie, if you can tie that behavior to the end goal of, if you can say, Hey, I noticed that, you know, when we doubled our followers last year on, you know, on Twitter, that it increased our Twitter leads by 5%. Well, now you’re , now, now we’re talking. And as long as the conversion rate was there associated to but I, that word engagement almost gives me chills every single time, because I, you know, someone will say, well, you know, we’ve, we’ve really got an amazing engagement with our clients, you know? And I say, I’d say, well, what is , what did define that to me? And well, our open rate is like, you know, double the industry average. Oh, wow. That’s amazing. How many leads are you getting? Well, it’s not really a lead generator for us.

Kyle Hamer: 

Well, then it’s not engagement.

Douglas Karr: 

Who cares that you doubled your followers or grew your list size or whatever, unless it’s, unless you can tie it statistically, you know, to an actual conversion, it doesn’t matter. And I think, look, that’s , that’s one of the big downfalls of social media. I think I was one of those guys out there, you know, back at the beginning of social media that said, this is incredible, what an incredible medi for us to, you know, to get into where we can have conversations with, with clients and prospects and everything else and lead them down this, you know, customer trail. And here I am, you know, 10 years later and I’m like, God, I wasted so much time on social media because all people wanted to do on social media was look at their friends pictures and see what they ate last night. And they , they didn’t want to be bothered by, you know, my business, you know, proposal or my new white paper or whatever. And and of course there’s exceptions to that. You know, there’s, you know, some Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups and things like that that are B2B, you know, more B2B related. But I, I can tell you that. I think the industry has spent, you know, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars on social media and, and didn’t see the conversions, they just didn’t see it. And now we’re back to, okay, let’s work on stuff that actually works. And social media is great for other things. It’s great for listening, reputation management, seeing a customer’s reputation and whether the replying on time, those are great things that I use it for. But but I’m not expecting to share an article on Twitter and get two leads off of it. I’m doing it more to , to help people in my industry to keep my name out there, to keep my authority up, you know, and and over time that, that, that does help the bottom line. But I am not expecting to, you know, if I increase from 10 tweets a day to 30 tweets a day, that’s gonna drive six more leads for me, not, not going to happen.

Kyle Hamer: 

Probably not. All right . So people process platform, those are the three PS of high-performance marketing final thoughts.

Douglas Karr: 

That’s it just, the final thoughts is, you know, I, the biggest thing I would say is be open to finding help with this. This is, you know , industry and you, you have to find the right partners and the right people that trust and that those could be peers in your own industry. It could be an industry group. It could be you know an association of some sort, it could be a LinkedIn group or a Facebook group or whatever, but but everything is moving so fast that we really do need to get out of our bubbles, you know, and, and ask for help from time to time, you know, to get feedback from people.

Kyle Hamer: 

I think that’s, it’s all spot on Douglas. It’s been great having you on the show. We really, really appreciate your generosity your knowledge and your insight and how you build a high-performance team and not get sucked into the Vore trap or vortex of death in just picking a platform for , from Artec . If somebody wants to get ahold of you, how do they get ahold of you? Where do they find you?

Douglas Karr: 

So, so my the big one is I run a site called MarTech zone. So MarTech zone, where you can see my, my thoughts on, you know, on new products and stuff. So if you want to research and , and look for solutions, it’s a great site to go to. I also do a podcast MarTech zone interviews, I’ll be interviewing you on it. So that’s exciting. And then and then my Salesforce agency which is basically my full-time job is hybrid consultants.com. So Highbridge is a Salesforce and marketing cloud certified partner. We do service cloud, mobile cloud ad studio, everything else but you know, a little bit quirky in that we’re mostly strategic leads that have experience with working with all kinds of enterprise platforms. And so while we, while we we love Salesforce or marketing cloud we really do help people kind of across the spectr you know, either evaluated as a solution or look to another solution instead that might be a better business, you know , decision to make

Kyle Hamer: 

Awesome. We’ll have the links in the, in the description or in the yeah , the description of the episode, or you can find it on the website. I’m your host, Kyle Hamer , we’ve been talking with Douglas Karr and we have talked about the three piece you’re listening to the summit podcast, make sure that it’s a great week, great month, great year, and whatever you’re doing, you’re progressing forward. Thanks for listening, like follow subscribe, and we’ll talk to you next week.

Douglas Karr
Douglas KarrMarTech Consultant, Speaker, Entrepreneur
Douglas is a recognized digital transformation expert in the digital marketing and technology space and consult local, startup, investment, and enterprise companies on how to best maximize their investments through education, process improvements, and platform selection and automation.

On any given week, you’ll find him speaking, developing and teaching workshops, writing on for his publication, interviewing leaders on his podcasts, and consulting with a handful of key clients.

Having started his career in the traditional marketing space with print advertising, database marketing, and direct mail. He transitioned to digital media and built a great reputation early in the industry. His companies quickly rose through the ranks of search engine marketing professionals and is now known around the globe for my focus on multi-channel marketing, compliance, and infrastructure.